There's a recurring thread in tech communities: "PHP is dying". It surfaces in Reddit threads, in Telegram chats, in the smug questions at job interviews. And yet — here we are in 2025, with PHP powering roughly 77% of server-side web, WordPress running a third of the internet, and Laravel as one of the most starred frameworks on GitHub.
So why does the myth persist?
It's not about the language
Most PHP criticism comes from two groups: people who last wrote PHP in 2009 (when it genuinely looked rough), and people who've never written it at all but absorbed the consensus from their social bubble.
Modern PHP — from 8.0 onward — has named arguments, match expressions, union types, fibers, readonly properties, enums. It's a completely different language from the spaghetti everyone remembers. The tooling, the ecosystem, the deployment patterns — all modern.
Any tool in professional hands becomes helpful, not an obstacle.
I've worked in PHP for years alongside C# (.NET), Python, and a bit of JavaScript. Each has its domain. PHP is excellent for the web: fast to deploy, huge community, battle-tested hosting infrastructure everywhere. Saying it's dead is like saying a hammer is obsolete because a drill exists.
The real problem is standards
When people say "PHP is bad", they usually mean "I saw bad PHP code once". And they're right — there's a lot of terrible PHP out there. But that's a skill problem, not a language problem. You can write catastrophic code in any language. You can also write clean, testable, well-architected systems in PHP — and many companies do.
The difference is the engineer, not the tool.
What to actually care about
Instead of debating language rankings, ask: does the person writing the code understand SOLID? Do they know when to abstract and when not to? Can they explain their architecture decisions? Can they review code, communicate blockers, mentor others?
That's what separates a professional from someone who just writes syntax. Language choice is downstream of all of that.
PHP is not dead. It's just not trendy. Those are different things.